The dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice in recent years has created a fundamental new change in the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere that has sped up sea ice loss and is affecting fall and winter weather across most of the Northern Hemisphere, according to several recent studies. Arctic sea ice loss peaks in September and October, exposing a large area of open water that heats the air above it. This extra heat has helped drive September - November air temperatures in the Arctic to 1°C (1.8°F) or more above average over about half of the depth of the lower atmosphere (Figure 1). This deep layer of warm air has grown less dense and expanded, pushing the top of the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) higher. The result has been a decrease in the pressure gradient (the difference in pressure) between the North Pole and mid-latitudes. With not as much difference in pressure to try and equalize, the jet stream has slowed down in the Arctic, creating a major change in the atmospheric circulation for the Northern Hemisphere.

the extreme loss of Arctic sea ice since 2001 has been accompanied by a radical shift of the Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns, into a new mode they call the Arctic Rapid change Pattern. The new atmospheric circulation pattern has also been recognized by other researchers, who refer to it as the Arctic Dipole ...

The old atmospheric patterns that controlled Arctic weather--the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO), which featured air flow that tended to circle the pole, now alternate with the new Arctic Dipole pattern. The Arctic Dipole pattern features anomalous high pressure on the North American side of the Arctic, and low pressure on the Eurasian side. This results in winds blowing more from south to north, increasing transport of heat into the central Arctic Ocean.

It turns out that the new Arctic circulation patterns help to intensify the Siberian High, a large semi-permanent region of surface high pressure prevalent in winter over Siberia ... resulting in colder than average temperatures from East Asia to Europe.

Low arctic ice has also been associated with drier winters in Northern Europe.

Arctic sea ice loss appears to have created a new atmospheric circulation pattern that brings more warm air in the Arctic, creating a positive feedback loop that causes even more sea ice loss. This feedback loop increases the likelihood that an ice-free Arctic in the summer will indeed come by 2030, as many Arctic experts are predicting.

We Are Here. (Somewhere)

Based on 30 years of working with dynamic, non-linear, dynamic non-linear, Chaotic dynamic non-linear, and Complex Chaotic dynamic non-linear Systems (to quote Drew, "Wheeeeeeeeeeee!") I can confidently say: I have no clue as to when Global Climate Change will become apparent to politicians, journalists, NCE economists, and the other intellectually negligible and neither does anybody else. What can be said is:

Global Climate Change is happening

It will happen quicker than the IPCC predicts

Ain't Gonna Stop It

The time for halting the Change is past. Once a Complex Chaotic dynamic non-linear System moves it continues to move until it finds a stable relationship between all it's attractors and all it's repellors.

4. The Effects Will Be Profound

We're talking a Global population loss of 30 to 60 percent based on the exact nature of the Change and the preparatory work done to alleviate the Change by national governments, international organizations, and NGOs.

the extreme loss of Arctic sea ice since 2001 has been accompanied by a radical shift of the Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns, into a new mode they call the Arctic Rapid change Pattern. The new atmospheric circulation pattern has also been recognized by other researchers, who refer to it as the Arctic Dipole ...
The old atmospheric patterns that controlled Arctic weather--the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO), which featured air flow that tended to circle the pole, now alternate with the new Arctic Dipole pattern.

Holy shit!

By the way the guys at Weather Underground do a stellar job and are authoritative as far as I can tell. Back during the Katrina aftermath Jeff Masters in particular was a must-read.

Already is. As a consensus body, IPCC will always make conservative predictions. I try to convince people that the two sides of the argument are not the climate change skeptics and the climate change enthusiasts, but the climate change enthusiasts and the doomsayers--the latter being the ones telling the truth... Such a party-pooper.

The IPCC and too many scientists are still in the business of trying to convince us that this is something we're going to avoid if we act now, rather than something we should be trying to minimize and cope with.

Thanks for this ATinNM! As you may know, this has been my own sense for a while--actually, for longer than I have been on ET.

I strongly suspect that the heat transport towards the Arctic at mid altitudes is mirrored by cold air moving on the surface towards mid-latitudes, thus accounting for the two recent very mild summers in Arkansas and other parts of the US-- sea ice and permafrost melting

Major remaining questions are timing and location specific impacts through the transition between poles of the dipole. Does Weather Underground have anything similar to say about Antarctica?

Another question is if the Greenland Ice Cap will melt sufficiently rapidly to shut down the Gulf Stream and the deep water saline counter current.

Caveat: I am not a Climate Scientist nor an Atmospheric Chemist. So I don't follow the recent journal articles, papers, & etc.

With that in mind ....

Haven't seen anything with this amount of 'Real World' point-at-ability with regard to Antarctic or the Greenland Ice Sheet - it's the latter that would/could/maybe affect the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Gyre, & etc.

One thing to keep in the back of one's mind is the Greenland Ice Core data indicates the last time the globe went through a Climate Change, at the end of the last Ice Age, the whole thing happened over 10/20 years min/max. This is consistent with other Complex Chaotic non-linear dynamic systems: when they tip or switch it happens very quickly -- 10/20 years in geologic time is way less than a second in human time. Currently we know of two potential forcing mechanisms: atmospheric CO2, mostly from human sources, and Methane, from human sources now but with the permafrost hotting-up natural sources will soon (?) make their affect known.

There is two ways the Siberian permafrost locked methane can be released: Burp or Ooze. If it's the former ... that's the world in a jippo. If it's the latter ... we've got a chance to have the time to change over.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

William Patterson, from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, and his colleagues have shown that switching off the North Atlantic circulation can force the Northern hemisphere into a mini `ice age' in a matter of months. Previous work has indicated that this process would take tens of years.

Warming changes ocean circulation patterns which produces a millennium long "mini-ice age" in parts of the northern hemisphere. Just as in the f-ing financial crisis, where we don't know whether to prepare for deflation or hyper-inflation, with the climate we don't know whether we will have very significant temperature increases over much of the northern hemisphere, or a new "ice age", or both, in sequence, depending on whether the "ice age" keeps the methane sequestered, re-freezes the permafrost and re-establishes the north polar ice cap.

The thing that seems most certain, that increasing atmospheric CO2 makes either possibility more likely, may well get lost in the noise made by those who want to keep burning coal cheaply.

But when that cold period ends the temperature would go up substantially in the affected parts of the northern hemisphere and stay up for a very long time.

Typically when a system like the Global Climate is in the process of moving to a new equilibrium it goes through a period of instability - hopping around in the Probability Space - before finally settling down.

Thus I would (kinda) expect 'non-intuitive' things to happen with the Climate and Weather before they settle down.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

"Geological evidence shows that the Big Freeze was brought about by a sudden influx of freshwater, when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans."

The underlying terrains are quite different between N. America and Greenland, but in both cases we have melting glaciers where melt water affects the rate of melting of the glacier and then gets dumped into the oceans. There are lots of unknowns:

How long did it take to drain Lake Agassiz?

What proportion of the pre-melt glacial mass was left intact after it drained?

What proportions went out via what is now Hudson Bay vs. the St. Laurence and did these possibly different sources of melt water differently affect the saline pump?

How large and rapid an increase of fresh water is required to significantly reduce the flow of the Gulf Stream and the deep saline counter current ?

While I am not aware of the possibility of the formation of a large glacial lake in Greenland, the terrain is vastly different and glacial flow, vs. glacial melt is very significant for Greenland, whereas glacial melt was likely the most significant factor in N. America. So:

How rapidly might the Greenland Ice Sheet collapse?

Could the point of release of melt water from Greenland be more or less detrimental to the stability of the North Atlantic currents?

I do not know the answers to any of these questions or even if they contain the most significant questions. But I am concerned that linear extrapolations of current melt rates into the future could be significantly underestimating the potential problem. I am also concerned that an increase in sea levels might only be one of the resulting problems.

Ordinarily, the southeast coast of Greenland features a cold water current flowing north to south, called the East Greenland Coastal Current (EGCC). Much of the cold water for this current is supplied by melting of the 14 glaciers in southeast Greenland that empty into the sea (two of these glaciers, Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim, represent 35% of east Greenland's total glacial discharge). A few hundred kilometers offshore, a warm water current called the Irminger Current flows the opposite direction, bringing warm water from the North Atlantic northward. In 2003, it happened that weather conditions over Greenland brought an unusually low amount of run-off of precipitation. With little new mass pushing the glaciers seaward, the glaciers responded by greatly reducing the amount of ice they dumped into the ocean by the shore. As a result, the East Greenland Coastal Current slowed down and warmed, which allowed the warm Irminger Current to advance towards the coast, warming the coastal waters even more. All that warm water near the coast began melting the glaciers where they reached the sea, causing the glaciers all along the southeast coast of Greenland to accelerate and rapidly thin between 2003 - 2005. By 2006, the thinning glaciers had dumped so much new ice into the ocean near the coast that the waters cooled and the East Greenland Coastal Current re-established itself. This cooled the glaciers at their marine termination points and slowed down the glacial surge, putting the glaciers back where they had been before 2003. This is a classic example of a negative feedback process--a change in weather conditions which generates a response, but the response creates conditions that tend to dampen the response.

Emphasis added.

The underlying impetus hasn't changed: global temperatures are edging up. Climatic and local response to the impetus can vary in non-intuitive ways IF that intuition is based on linear thinking. With non-linear dynamic systems negative feedback loops, positive feedback loops, strange loops can all be encountered but each of these are temporary, from a geological time perspective, within the larger phenomena.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

In the closing phase of the last ice age the Southern Hemisphere began warming first. As a result, the Antarctic sea ice melted. It was at least a thousand years later - as evidenced by investigations of Greenland ice cores - that the high northern latitudes began to get warmer. Sea ice in the North Atlantic retreated and the great continental ice sheets in Scandinavia, Greenland, and North America melted.

In the Nature article, the two investigators document for the first time how the climate shift was initiated by the interplay between the southern and northern Atlantic regions at the end of the last ice age about 15,000 years ago.

A critical point was reached in the North Atlantic after 1,000 years. The now salty North Atlantic water, giving up its stored heat to the atmosphere and thereby cooling down, becomes so heavy that it sinks rapidly in the Greenland Sea and flows southward at a depth of about 2,000 meters. In response, at the surface, more warm water is pulled in from the south to replace the heavy sinking water. The heat pump of the Gulf Stream triggers the onset of the warm period in the Northern Hemisphere.

"Our calculations show that the Gulf Stream was abruptly turned on again about 15,000 years ago. This led to a temperature increase in the North Atlantic of about 6 degrees Celsius," says Dr. Gerrit Lohmann. "This, in turn, resulted in the partial melting of the continental ice, and an influx of melt water into the ocean." Nevertheless, the model calculations presented indicate that this light, non-saline water didn't significantly affect the heat pump in the North Atlantic.

But records of past climates--from a variety of sources such as deep-sea sediments and ice-sheet cores--show that the Conveyor has slowed and shut down several times in the past. This shutdown curtailed heat delivery to the North Atlantic and caused substantial cooling throughout the region. One earth scientist has called the Conveyor "the Achilles' heel of our climate system."

If the climate system's Achilles' heel is the Conveyor, the Conveyor's Achilles' heel is the North Atlantic. An influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic's surface could create a lid of more buoyant fresh water, lying atop denser, saltier water. This fresh water would effectively cap and insulate the surface of the North Atlantic, curtailing the ocean's transfer of heat to the atmosphere.

An influx of fresh water would also dilute the North Atlantic's salinity. At a critical but unknown threshold, when North Atlantic waters are no longer sufficiently salty and dense, they may stop sinking. An important force driving the Conveyor could quickly diminish, with climate impacts resulting within a decade.

And of course we are already IN an inter-glacial at the present. So the sequence of events that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age are not properly the model for what we can expect next. I follow this stuff reasonably well and do not recall seeing any studies that give comparative information on the transition from an inter-glacial such as we now are in to a super-interglacial period, which, at worst, we could be transitioning into.

But events we have studied from the last great melting 15,000 years ago do indicate that intense periods of cooling can accompany long term warming trends. To me the only sane thing to do is to attempt to get back to early 20th century levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses asap. Thinking that holding the increase to 2C will save us from a massive climate change may prove hopeful at best. But that is sufficiently far from consensus as to seem crazy in today's climate of opinion, such as it is.

While I am not aware of the possibility of the formation of a large glacial lake in Greenland, the terrain is vastly different and glacial flow, vs. glacial melt is very significant for Greenland, whereas glacial melt was likely the most significant factor in N. America. So:

How rapidly might the Greenland Ice Sheet collapse?

Could the point of release of melt water from Greenland be more or less detrimental to the stability of the North Atlantic currents?

I am unable to find it now, but I once saw a map of what Greenland would look like if the ice was just lifted of. Most of the center was below sea level, with below sea level connections to the Atlantic at the west side of Greenland. To me that would imply that if a large lake would form it would be most likely to break westwards instead of eastwards.

By 8400 years B.P., Lake Agassiz had reached a size of 841,000 km2, with a volume of >150,000 km3 (Teller et al., 2002; Clarke et al., 2003, 2004). Shortly after this, the glacial barrier across Hudson Bay no longer was able to retain the impounded waters of Lake Agassiz, and it drained through Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait to the Labrador Sea (Fig. 3) (Barber et al., 1999). Teller et al. (2002) estimate that Lake Agassiz drained in less than a year.

The ice dam that caused glacial Lake Agassiz to form was probably penetrated by expansion of a subglacial leakage path. A huge volume of freshwater was released northward to Hudson Bay and ultimately to the North Atlantic Ocean. The flood is thought to have triggered the cold event that occurred 8,200 years ago.

Not yet. AFAIK, the permafrost areas are 'geysering' methane from different locations and it is unknown if this will continue (the Ooze Scenario) or if there is a tipping point and a number of them will all let go in one go (the Burp Scenario.)

Or some mixture of the two.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Not kidding but I'm not expecting the kind of effort needed to address the situation.

Need to find the cite, Altemeyer ran a scenario where all of the participates where Right Wing Authoritarians. Without a Social Dominate to tell them what to do, they did nothing. The scenario, IIRC, was halted prematurely because everybody was dead. Now I don't expect the human species to go to extinction from Global Climate Change. I do expect a large depopulation with the percentage of such based on -- a ratio? -- ameliorative Top/Down action. Bottom/Up action(s) are important but do not, cannot, have widespread impact(s).

The above argument is why I posted the wide spread estimate percentages.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

I realize that my making this book available for free on the internet raises questions
about my judgment, especially since I am a psychologist. The well-known theory of cognitive dissonance says that people will value something more if they pay a lot of money to get it. So how much will people value what they get for free? Also, if somebody can make money off a book, how much common sense can he have if he gives it away? Why should you read a book
written by someone who has so little common sense? There=s a lot of convincing evidence that dissonance theory is right, and so I am running the risk of your saying, AIt can't be any good if it's free.@ But there is another psychological principle which says if people experience something that meets a need, it will be a rewarding experience. So even though this book is free, I hope that you will find it worth your reading, and that if you think it's a good book, you will tell others about this web site so they can read it too. I'm not doing any advertising in the New York Times.

Well, I prefer paper as well, but have started keeping a folder entitled "Online texts" in which The Authoritarians had languished for at least a year when Jake made the reference up-thread. So I recalled it, could find it and posted a link to you. Having, after all, a finite space for bookshelves and a finite budget I have learned to live with online texts. When you can enlarge it sufficiently to easily read from 1m it is not so bad, especially when it is free and can be readily copied and pasted.

I read the preface, skipped to chapter 4 and then read to page 200 over the last few hours. WOW! Now I am going to go back and read the first three chapters before finishing the book. The Global Change Game sounds fascinating.

Here in SF (not San Francisco) we are promised -15 C tomorrow. I have a graphics meeting in town, and it'll probably take me 5 minutes to strip down to meeting apparel! Luckily the air is usually very dry, so no steamed up glasses. Just nip into the bog, wipe the nose, check the mirror and then on to some nice buns and coffee. I'll rephrase that for our American audience: nice Danish and coffee.

I shall be the only male, as is often the case with graphic designers in the marketing industry.

Then we shall attempt to construct a diagram of the elements of cleantech for a Chinese audience. Then back on with the multiple layers and back to the woods.

Two passing comments. Re irresponsibility of Diplomats: Just finished watching "DefCon-2" on the Military Channel, about the Cuban Missile Crisis, where literally the fate of the earth was in the hands of captains and majors, not only of the USSR and USA, but the Cuban commanders of SAM-2 antiaircraft missile batteries, one of whom went rogue and shot down an American U2 reconnaissance aircraft 75,000 feet up at the most critical point in the confrontation. Fortunately, John F Kennedy was one of those ditherers like Obama, and wiser heads prevailed.

At the time there were enough Soviet Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles to smash the entire USA, on four-hour alert. My father, Master Chief Albert Otvos, who'd been recalled from recent retirement, was leading chief at Boca Chica Naval Air Station near Key West, called me in San Francisco and scared the shit out of me, saying it looked like the Marines were going in. At the time there were 40,000 Russian troops in Cuba, with tactical nuclear weapons, Soviet submarines with nuclear torpedoes near US carriers.

Copenhagen doesn't sound so bad compared to that.

Second, regards chaotic oscillation space. The son drives truck in the upper USA, Washington state to Chicago. As a former Marine Reconnaissance Ranger, he's been trained to notice things. We were talking on the cell phone about this very Arctic Dipole article tonight, and it prompted him to say that the weather for the last eight years has been extremely inconsistent. Has anyone a link to a comparative chart for that period of time and place?